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Sunday, May 2, 2010

Reviving the Sun Porch

One of the greatest features of the classic English Tudor we're working on is this beautiful enclosed sun porch. The vintage bi-fold windows accordion and all slide to one side of the room, making the room feel like it's inside the cedar tree.

Unfortunately, the 90 year old windows were allowing water to get inside the walls and rot the structural posts, as well as rotting the window sashes and sills.

We had window companies look at replacing them, but no one was sure about how to rebuild these windows and have them function in the same way. The prices were incredibly high. We developed a plan to rebuild the windows ourselves. We had ASAP Custom Windows make the new wooden window sashes, then our guys carefully took apart the jambs piece by piece and milled new parts to the exact sizes of the old that would work with the antique hardware.

It was a very technical and complicated project that was great for the house. The sun porch is still bright and airy, the new bi-fold windows are solid with proper flashing, and they function better than ever!

11 comments:

We're working on our sun porch today too! Your windows are beautiful, so unique. We bought replacements from JeldWen, which should be here on Tuesday. Ours weren't worth saving though; it took a hammer and lots of banging just to get a few panes open so we could have a little fresh air while we painted today.

I'm a big fan of how your sun room looks. Great job. I just got my sunroom renovated with a company in Tennessee named RSU Contractors and they turned out some beautiful work too. You might get some ideas for other restoration projects. I included their website here:http://rsucontractors.com/Looking forward to checking out more of your home improvement pictures!